Rabbi Seeking
WISENBERG, S. L.
Rabbi Seeking 36 MOMENT* MARCH 1988 S.L. WISENBERG Congregation: We are looking for a rabbi. A new rabbi. The last one, everyone said, was a nice man. He was a nice man who wore a nice...
...New Rabbi's Wife: I want alchemy—to change this god into man, to make clay feet, to grind these clay feet into dust...
...I have seen the rabbi in his underwear...
...The congregation's doubts lie upon my doorstep...
...The rabbi's wife is his secretary, emissary, scribe, an expert on all household laws, a nanny putting the children through their paces like miniature diplomats...
...The rabbi drives his car and wears cotton, conditions his hair with oil of jojoba...
...I work until late Thursday searching for fish...
...I delve into waters while they bury themselves in stocks and inventories and blueprints...
...I will present it to them like the first fruits of the harvest...
...New Rabbi's Wife: Wife of the man of God...
...Congregation: Then we will love him...
...He leads the congregation on retreat...
...Will he live for me...
...I can see that he is a man, even if they won't let him be ordinary...
...Something that wouldn't get lost in the shopping mall...
...On the Sabbath we wade into the ocean on Miami Beach and jump toward the moon...
...Stones of belief...
...He was not what we wanted...
...The Bible tells of a fish our ancestors used to dye the tzitzil blue...
...New Rabbi: They telephone all evening...
...They like the way I dress...
...I am Jacob and he is my angel...
...Of course not...
...The endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question...
...Congregation: Do we believe in his belief in this God...
...Visitors would leave, visibly impressed, remarking, "How remarkable...
...I have seen the rabbi in his underwear, without his glasses...
...They are coins from shattered countries, from shattered lives...
...Like a redcap of our spiritual lives, we want him to call, "Coming through, watch ahead, coming through...
...I'm only a man...
...We are waiting for the messiah and we are getting his son, the rabbi...
...We want someone who can speak the language, like our grandfathers new in America who would hire someone to write letters for them...
...Is a grown man allowed to roam in this brine...
...The congregation's doubts lie upon my doorstep like dirty laundry, and I cant open the door...
...We are waiting for the rabbi and we want to make him a messiah...
...We want someone to kindle...
...Sacred wrapped around profane...
...We want him to tell us we are not merely blinded by sentiment...
...We want someone who can go to the mountain and negotiate for our souls, if need be...
...I am becoming a fisherman, a seeker of substance, of air...
...I have felt his flesh enter into mine...
...New Rabbi: I am searching for the meaning of this fish, the impossible fish of the messiah, the secret recipe of the perfect color for the perfect fringe of the tallit, the perfect shape of the world...
...For hidden meanings, God's sleight-of-hand...
...But what he said was not important...
...I follow this man in his jumping toward the light...
...My angel," I say...
...The doubts combine with mine and I can't open the door...
...Here is what it is," he will tell us...
...Congregation: We are waiting...
...The lost fish will help us find ourselves...
...Joining but not becoming a part of...
...I'm afraid I love too deeply and have already given too much...
...In other respects, he is so much like other men...
...What a clever boy...
...To talk of your husband, the brother of God, in a women's group...
...I wish he were a king...
...Everyone sighs...
...It is true, as they say: In a pinch we trade sermons—changing a few key paragraphs...
...A strong stone of God inside them...
...As if the man of God is allowed to lay down his head only one night a week...
...The pliant tree in its grasping for air and light and water becomes more of a tree...
...It is for my sermons, and for them...
...I dream of catching this fish, this fish of word and symbol, chasing inference, seductive leads, tendrils of hints, stealthily rounding corners...
...I plumb the invisible, the symbol...
...In awe during sex, during the moments of release, of loss, of gain, I wonder: Is this a holy man...
...Is it perhaps another semantic etymological conundrum, a mistranslation...
...Who is this God...
...We do not want a son of God...
...My angel," he says...
...It has never been second nature in filling out forms, even at the dentist's: "spouse's profession...
...This is what must be done...
...If it were important it would have transformed us...
...I saw them everywhere...
...He tells us of his struggle...
...Everyone calls him by his first name...
...At least he's not like one of the crazies who blesses ships and goats and new buildings...
...A group for rabbis' wives...
...Does it say "Rabbi" on our American Express card...
...It is too dark for the tourists to gawk at us...
...New Rabbi: I am diving for meaning...
...Without his underwear, without his glasses...
...Alchemy...
...Or duke...
...The fish will be balm for our souls...
...Too deeply...
...We want the rabbi to walk behind us and say, "Look, you dropped this, surely you didn't mean to...
...Did it actually exist...
...We do not want a comedian...
...We want someone like Abraham, who bargains with God...
...My wife, married to the house, the life, to the path behind me or beside me—I don't know which any more—she wants my search to be important, resents my doubts and I resent hers, and try to hide mine, and she feels ashamed for hers, so steps too quietly behind me as I study and search...
...He was a nice man who wore a nice suit...
...the neighbors ask...
...He was there at Cozumel in the honeymoon suite...
...In the man's love for God...
...I am proud they are watching me, the rabbi's wife, and ashamed...
...Someone to collect the wood, too...
...He has some dignity of office and he has standards, though they are painful...
...They come wanting with large empty buckets, clattering to my well...
...God's daughter-in-law...
...All leaping...
...The other rabbi was a nice man who wore his nice suit to luncheons, councils, meetings of power, who paid attention to the trappings that make the office pleasant...
...He said we were like the moon, like light, like new fruits, as whole unto ourselves as a great ball of cool light...
...Join together, dust of my dust, his rib, our children, our congregation...
...Did it de-evolve...
...What did we do to lose this fish...
...And what does your husband do...
...Though it was no different from night after night in New York...
...Years ago this man said, "Trust me, I will save you—if you agree to save me...
...We do not want a son...
...Does a grown man dare admit to his neighbor home from the train that he spent his day searching through books for fish that live on many levels, fish he could not eat for dinner...
...After I find it, will it mean anything, this snail-darter of the soul...
...I thrive on display...
...They toil in their banking houses, in cubicles, ordering inventories, measuring...
...I keep the punchlines...
...Even if he is like a professor in that way...
...Q...
...They bring their doubts and their emptiness like a vacuum...
...Something more defined...
...We don't know if this is indeed a vocation like any other...
...my grandfather's bookends cradle the commentaries of Rashi...
...Is this fish extinct...
...My children link arms with other children...
...But he is not the rabbi...
...He says, "Stay inside with me where it's warm...
...The running creates the runner, while the thought of running does not...
...I am trying to make us whole...
...Through struggle to maintain ourselves, he said, quoting Spinoza, we find ourselves...
...We both wear white on Shabbat...
...The doubts like dirty laundry, in bundles...
...Would he die for me...
...We embrace as rabbi a Jewish man with a sad face and a philosophy that's deep, for America, who states his views through his films...
...I can't tell if he's only a man...
...We don't want to love this swatch of threads just because it's always been in the family, just because we've had it so long...
...New Rabbi's Wife: The rabbi's wife does not have a profession even if he wakes up and goes to the office like anyone else...
...Counting makes the accountant...
...Like a prospector, like an appraiser, his light catching the glint of something important in the dust: ' 'Yes, there is this tribe called the Jews...
...This is the modern era...
...And there is something about them...
...Taking off mine...
...Part of my childhood rises up with him on the bimah, wisps of my morning dream in a paragraph of a sermon...
...But lo, our instruments are rusted and we cannot hear...
...The ocean sighs...
...It will lead me to Eden, through Ararat and Babel, through gates and straits and over walls of doubt and faith...
...Or at the doctor's, highest priest of all...
...I am only a woman," I said...
...It is as warm as a bath...
...The rabbis were made stronger and frailer by their belief...
...I am wetting my face, salt clinging and stinging...
...They believe too much...
...We want a rabbi who is a father...
...Tell us it's not fool's gold, a huckster's baubles...
...Is this a holy act...
...I was raised to be some kind of ornament...
...I say, "Bring your faith and share it...
...I have heard the rabbi's cry of ecstasy when he has taken off his robes, my robes...
...But we don't believe...
...Whom does he love better...
...We live in a time when comedians joke about rabbis, when comedians blur into rabbis...
...I do not mention this fish to the new congregation...
...Do I believe in the love of God for this man...
...My best friends are other rabbis and ministers...
...Congregation: He showed us the moon...
...It will tell us what we lost, what we must find to heal...
...I hold the waists of the women...
...Buried treasures...
...Time has rusted them and democracy has rusted them...
...New Rabbi's Wife: After many years I can joke about his jokes...
...And the dust I'll brush with the bottom of my foot to make a footprint...
...Though that isn't our daily currency...
...Someone who will make us believe in the fire, in the passion of souls, of belief...
...So easy to talk to, people said...
...The answer lies in wait for me somewhere in these books of holy words, these theories of ancient history, facsimiles of ancient scrolls...
...What a clever boy," they will say...
...That should not be the business of our rabbi...
...Always...
...In America, can you have a spokesman, an instrument of God, when all are created equal under heaven, one-man-one-vote, lack of education or English no barrier to the ballot-box...
...This is an age of vanity...
...New Rabbi: Then they will love me...
...We want the rabbi to impress upon us their significance, the way you press a coin into a worthy man's hand...
...No scholar has pinpointed this fish...
...We know we're smart (smarter than the rabbi—we know the money isn't in the rabbinate), smart enough to demand a rabbi to challenge us and translate for us, to tell us why our ancestors' struggle to hold on to this was important...
...We want him to tell us they weren't foolish, that there is something precious in the tattered bundles they have left us...
...It will lead me away but the purpose is to lead back, to give them an answer, to find the analog, to spread the message clear as their blueprints: This is why...
...This life of faith is not easy...
...And their unhappinesses all alike, all different and wanting...
...Or at least a husband...
...We want one who is not sullied by closeness to power—who does not have to mention the men of the city or of Washington that he has conferred with, the boards he has officiated on, the men he calls by their first names, the women who call him on business...
...I know this, my guilt, my pride...
...We struggle to respect a man who believes in spirits...
...I dream of catching this fish, bringing it up to the bimah, displaying it...
...I think: The devil was only a man and girls should watch out for cloven hooves...
...Not enough...
...God is watching...
...Who says that he knows that when we put the word upon God, He evaporates, an animal who disappears from our traps...
...I can see that he is a man, even if they won't let him be ordinary...
...New Rabbi: The congregation wears white, discusses during the discussions, takes the aliyot, they have faith I will lead them where I will lead them...
...I do not want to appear eccentric...
...Judaism is not a summer vacation...
...Looking for his underwear...
...And stronger...
...The precious rabbis of our imaginings, we carry them in our inner hearts—we remember their thin gray beards, fragile like baby's breath, their bodies thinning to sticks in the camps...
...Looking for his glasses...
...I toe the line well— chic but not flashy—the figure after two children...
...New Rabbi's Wife: The doubts combine with his and we can't open the door...
...New Rabbi: People on pedestals long to look someone in the eye...
...Is it a recipe or a metaphor...
...But there is no one to tell this to...
...We want someone who can extract all the meaning and import from the words, can kindle more from the man-written, God-written texts, who can say not that he has seen God, but that he has felt God, that he understands what the ancients meant when they talked about a god...
...he won't marry anyone who has chosen outside the faith...
...What did we do to lose the recipe...
...How goodly are your tents O Jacob, my angel...
...Did it live in the Dead Sea before it became too salty...
...The old people, the old nonbelievers who still cling to Stalin, see us and are sad for the illusions of believers, the way the believers are sad for the old ones' disbelief and their narrowing of vision, for their"one big union that never came to be...
...On Friday they work late...
...I wrestle with God...
...The seeking creates the seeker...
...His English name...
...The wrestling with his angel...
...New Rabbi's Wife: Then he will be theirs...
...Every utterance seems a violation...
...Men of God...
...Do I love God...
...On Saturday they sleep or make love all irtorning...
...But they are old...
...Do I love this man who loves God...
Vol. 13 • March 1988 • No. 1
